San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

[Chris Knipp]

CLAIRE'S CAMERA (Hong Sang-soo 2017)

A shorter film produced by Hong's swift, improvisational method, which seems to be working for him very well. This one has a Metascore of 80%. It was shot at Cannes, and includes Isabelle Huppert as a high school teacher on vacation with a Polaroid camera, who has never been to Cannes before. I like them longer and with more Korean (this is largely in English, nobody's native language here), but this is still profound, yet witty and light.

[Chris Knipp]

THE HUMAN ELEMENT (Matthew Testa 2018)

A brand new film about James Balog, the subject of what may be the best climate change movie of them all, Jeff Orlowski's Chasing Ice. This time he's away from the ice focused on the elements, earth, air, fire, and water, all of them, he shows, radically changed and changing due to a fifth element: the human element. If you think this is just another climate change movie, you're wrong. There can't be too many climate change movies. And James Balog is a photographer, who records events iin still photos. He is as important in his way as Bill McKibben, the founder of 360.org.